In an examination of the interaction between object positions, (morphological) case marking, and discourse functions in both Urdu and Turkish we determined in previous work (Butt and King 1995) that the interaction between immediately preverbal focus and the distribution of objects must distinguish between two differing types of objects. To this end, we adopted a version of the structural and semantic distinction between Strong and Weak objects first proposed by de Hoop (1992).

The data to be accounted for are essentially as follows. Urdu allows direct objects to surface with two kinds of morphological case: nominative (unmarked) and accusative ("-ko"). This difference in morphological marking correlates with a difference in interpretation: accusative objects must be interpreted as specific, nominative objects need not be. This is reminiscent of a similar pattern in Turkish (Enc 1991). Furthermore, nominative objects can only be interpreted as nonspecific in the immediately preverbal position. When scrambled, they must be interpreted as specific. This pattern was first noted by T. Mohanan (1993) for Hindi and is again reminiscent of Turkish where "bare" NPs cannot usually appear in any position other than the immediately preverbal one (Kornfilt 1995). In addition, focus is also situated in the immediately preverbal position in both Urdu and Turkish, thus leading to a seeming conflict of interest with regard to this position.

In this talk, we present the interaction between topic, background, immediately preverbal focus, and objects for Urdu, and then concentrate on examining the distribution of the two differing types of objects in Urdu from a linking perspective. In particular, we propose to inform the linking theory of LFG through a different semantic perspective, thus allowing for a linking rather than a structural account of the distinction between Strong and Weak objects.